Ernst Öpik

Ernst Öpik, in full Ernst Julius Öpik, (born October 23, 1893, Port-Kunda, Estonia, Russian Empire [now Kunda, Estonia]—died September 10, 1985, Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland), Estonian astronomer who was best known for his studies of meteors and meteorites and whose life work was devoted to understanding the structure and evolution of the cosmos.

In 1916 Öpik received his degree in astronomy from Moscow University. In 1919 he joined the staff of the Tashkent Observatory (now in Uzbekistan) and from 1921 to 1944 worked at the Astronomical Observatory in Tartu, Estonia. The research he performed during the early 1920s elucidated the theory of the entry of high-speed bodies into the atmosphere and was fundamental to the understanding of ablation, the peeling back of meteor surfaces during vaporization. In 1922 he proposed the double-count method of tallying meteors, in which two observers work simultaneously. His work on meteors enabled him to correctly predict the frequencies of craters on Mars many years before these could be ascertained. He also contributed to cometary studies and proposed that a reservoir of comets orbits the Sun, providing the source of those few comets that assume orbits sufficiently eccentric to bring them so close to the Sun that they are visible. (In 1950 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort used the orbits of comets to show the existence of this reservoir, now called the Oort cloud.)

In 1922 Öpik proved that the source of stellar energy was nuclear and heavily dependent upon temperature. At this time he also made an estimate of the distance of the Andromeda Galaxy that showed that it was so far away that it was not in the Milky Way Galaxy but was a galaxy in its own right. In the 1930s and ’50s he made estimates of the age of the universe from meteorites and from galactic and extragalactic statistics. After World War II Öpik left his Baltic homeland and joined the staff of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. From 1956 he held a position on the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, dividing his time equally between Armagh and Maryland.